With each passing year, the number of connected devices in the average modern production facility seem to grow exponentially. As the Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 usher in an age where manufacturing machines are constantly collecting and exchanging data with each other and operators, managing and reacting to that data is an ever-present priority for any company that makes “making things” their business.
MachineMetrics COO and Co-Founder Eric Fogg spoke with Logic Supply, our Gateway supplier, to answer some of these questions including why MachineMetrics chose their IoT Gateway as the hardware solution and how today’s factories are using data to optimize every aspect of production.
For any truly transformational technology, Fogg argues that the first step is gaining the capability necessary for that big revolutionary step. "Say you’re baking a cake; first you need all of the ingredients to be combined before you can actually cook it and really turn it into something. At MachineMetrics we’re hoping to do much of that baking for our clients, combining technologies that have emerged and that we’ve developed over time, into something transformative for their business. and that’s where hardware comes into play. One component in the revolution for users of our software is an affordable hardware platform that’s easy to deploy and dependable long-term as this technology evolution continues."
One thing that truly separates MachineMetrics from other manufacturing analytics platforms is in our "machine agnosticism"; we can connect to any brand or type of machine, from the latest machine models to legacy equipment. "Every machine that we connect is different," Fogg says, "Each time our technicians go into a shop they may have 25 machines that might use 25 different protocols, or they have physically different connectors that they need to interface with. Over the years we've accumulated a lot of knowledge and experience in making those connections to ensure effective communication between devices, but our hardware solution had to be as flexible as our software in terms of connectivity."
Check out the Case Study and read the Full Interview with Eric Here!